Cyclists in shared bus lanes: could there be unrecognised impacts on bus journey times?

This paper contributes to debates around improving the modelling of cycles, through an exploratory case study of bus–cycle interactions in London. This case study examines undocumented delays to buses caused by high volumes of cyclists in bus lanes. It has generally been assumed that cyclists do not noticeably delay buses in shared lanes. However, in many contexts where cyclists routinely share bus lanes, cyclist numbers have historically been low. In some such places, bus lanes are now seeing very high volumes of cyclists, far above those previously studied. This may have implications for bus – and cycle – journey times, but traditionally traffic modelling has not represented the effects of such interactions well. With some manipulation of parameters taken from models of other cities, the model described here demonstrates that cycles can cause significant delays to buses in shared lanes, at high cycling volumes. These delays are likely to become substantially larger if London's cycling demographic becomes more diverse, because cyclist speeds will decline. Hence bus journey time benefits may derive from separating cycles from buses, where cycle flows are high. The project also suggests that microsimulation modelling software, as typically used, remains problematic for representing cyclists

Evolution of heterogeneous cellular automata in fluctuating environments

The importance of environmental fluctuations in the evolution of living organisms by natural selection has been widely noted by biologists and linked to many important characteristics of life such as modularity, plasticity, genotype size, mutation rate, learning, or epigenetic adaptations. In artificial-life simulations, however, environmental fluctuations are usually seen as a nuisance rather than an essential characteristic of evolution. HetCA is a heterogeneous cellular automata characterized by its ability to generate open-ended long-term evolution and ``evolutionary progress''. In this paper, we propose to measure the impact of different types of environmental fluctuations in HetCA. Our results indicate that environmental changes induce mechanisms analogous to epigenetic adaptation or multilevel selection. This is particularly prevalent in two of the tested fluctuation schemes, which involve a round-robin inhibition of certain cell types, where phenotypic selection seems to occur

Cultural Evolution, Disinformation, and Social Division

Diversity of expertise is inherent to cultural evolution. When it is transparent, diversity of human knowledge is useful; when social conformity overcomes that transparency, “expertise” can lead to divisiveness. This is especially true today, where social media has increasingly allowed misinformation to spread by prioritizing what is recent and popular, regardless of validity or general benefit. Whereas in traditional societies there was diversity of expertise, contemporary social media facilitates homophily, which isolates true subject experts from each other and from the wider population. Diversity of knowledge thus becomes social division. Here, we discuss the potential of a cultural-evolutionary framework designed for the countless choices in contemporary media. Cultural-evolutionary theory identifies key factors that determine whether communication networks unify or fragment knowledge. Our approach highlights two parameters: transparency of information and social conformity. By identifying online spaces exhibiting aggregate patterns of high popularity bias and low transparency of information, we can help define the “safe limits” of social conformity and information overload in digital communications.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: S.V. is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MCIN) AEI grant PID2020-117822GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. B.V. and S.V. are further supported through the BiodivRestore ERA-NET Cofund (GA N°101003777) MPA4Sustainability project, as well as MCIN grant PCI2022-132936 and PIE-202120E047-Conexiones-Life.Peer reviewe

Strangers look sicker (with implications in times of COVID‐19)

We animals have evolved a variety of mechanisms to avoid conspecifics who might be infected. It is currently unclear whether and why this "behavioral immune system" targets unfamiliar individuals more than familiar ones. Here I answer this question in humans, using publicly available data of a recent study on 1969 participants from India and 1615 from the USA. The apparent health of a male stranger, as estimated from his face, and the comfort with contact with him were a direct function of his similarity to the men in the local community. This held true regardless of whether the face carried overt signs of infection. I conclude that our behavioral immune system is finely tuned to degrees of outgroupness - and that cues of outgroupness are partly processed as cues of infectiousness. These findings, which were consistent across the two cultures, support the notion that the pathogens of strangers are perceived as more dangerous

Assessing quantitative methods in archaeology via simulated datasets: The Archaeoriddle challenge. Concept, project and motivations

Compared to what is found in many other scientific disciplines, archaeological data are typically scarce, biased and fragmented. This, coupled with the fact that archaeologists can rarely test their hypotheses using experimental design, makes archaeological inference and our ability to assess the robustness of quantitative methods used to make such inferences challenging.Archaeoriddle is a project that was born as an attempt to compare archaeological methods in an artificial scenario where the behaviour to be reconstructed was known. In this project we organised an experiment where a virtual archaeological record generated from a simulated interaction between hunter–gatherers and early farmers in a fictional landscape was shared with interested participants. Three archaeological questions were posed and the participants were challenged to answer them with the data that the developer team made available. The model and the generative processes behind the virtual record were known to the developers of the virtual world (Rabbithole) but not to the participants. Additionally, players were allowed to sample only a subset of the data from Rabbithole, mimicking real-life archaeological research and sampling efforts.The long-term aim of the project is to assess how different methods performed under a controlled environment since, in this case, we knew the correct answers to the questions posed. This experience provided us with some insights into (1) how efficient various archaeological methods are in answering complex questions; (2) the degree of interest from archaeologists in improving their analytical techniques; and (3) the potential of archaeological method when free from external constraints (e.g. budget, fieldwork, etc.)